The Cambridge Companion to H.D. is a critical overview of the author's work, featuring analyses of her major poetry, prose, translations and nonfiction, as well as arguments of how the author fits in the literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century. The essays we have specially commissioned for this volume were written by leading or emerging scholars in the field. In our choices we attempt to give a sense of the diverse viewpoints through which H.D. has been read.

The book is divided into two parts. The first examines the literary context of H.D.'s work. The essays focus on specific issues and debates, such as the author's initial displacement from and reinstatement in the modernist canon, her tendency to use biography in her work, her active contribution to ‘little magazines’, her work's affinities with modernism, her utilisation of gendered perspectives, and the lasting influence of her aesthetics on later generations of writers. These readings intend both to concisely map the field of H.D. and to help familiarise the reader with the contexts through which her work is read. These discourses are wide-ranging, taking in the history of canon formation, biographical approaches to literature, modernist culture and literature, gender theory/feminism and the writer's legacy.

The second part of the book explores a wide range of H.D.'s major texts, including her most well-known poetry and prose, translations and memoirs. The chapters are organised mainly in chronological terms, starting with her early poetry in Sea Garden (1916) and finishing with her 1940s works, The Gift and Tribute to Freud. We hope that this structural arrangement will help to locate H.D. both within the social and cultural context of modernity and also within the context of the dialectic between the Romantic, Victorian and modernist aesthetics.